“What’s the good of fighting critics? Mind you, some of them are very able… But only a few can form any opinion of a new work. Most of them are simply on the lookout for novelty. They hear too much, and they hear it the wrong way. They get like children who are peevish from having too many toys…”
“Nothing, nothing whatever really stands in the way of a creative artist except lack of talent.”
—Robertson Davies, A Mixture of Frailties
Read Chaim Potok’s strange yet compelling My Name Is Asher Lev and skip its deracinated sequel, The Gift of Asher Lev.
My Name is Asher Lev concerns a boy divided between the drive for art that possesses him and the Hasidic religion into which he is born, which is somewhat like the Jewish equivalent of fundamentalist Christians. Think of his sect like the Verbovers of Michael Chabon’s The Yiddish Policemen’s Union. The duality inherent in mixed loyalties is hardly a new topic; the most obvious example I know of is Herman Hesse’s Narcissus and Goldmund. But it’s done well here, and one feels Asher’s agony as he attempts to tread the artist’s path and the Hasidim’s. Inside, however, the artist predominates, and, as is typical in American fiction, self identity trumps group identity, as it should. Maybe Asher can’t help it. As a young man, he
began to realize that something was happening to my eyes. I looked at my father and saw lines and planes I had never seen before. I could feel with my eyes. […] I could feel texture and color.
The struggle to develop his eye and practice his visual art while remaining faithful to the extreme interpretations and teachings of religion fuels the novel’s conflict. Asher doesn’t give up, and if at times the pompousness of the art talk almost overwhelms, other moments of genuine emotion make up for near bombast. In some criticism of Asher’s art within the novel, one senses the same kind of criticism that might be used against Potok: sentimentality and a rejection of trends in art hobble him. Both novels act as defenses against that charge, and they are mostly successful. In growing up, Asher makes the difficult choices growing up entails. We think he makes the correct trade-offs, but in such a milieu, those trade-offs are grave indeed.
Parts of the novel fail, like a painting askew: a mythic ancestor arrives in Asher’s dreams for no particular point, and many descriptions are flat, especially given all the discussions of how an artist sees. Ones like this appear over and over:
I got off the train and climbed the stairs to the street. It was cold and wet and gray. A bitter wind blew against the tall buildings.
or
The beds were covered with spreads. The refrigerator hummed softly. The apartment was neat and clean and faintly resonant with its own silence.
or
It was a large waiting room with white walls, a single window in the wall to my right, and a heavy wooden door in the wall across from the window. There was a desk beneath the window and chairs along the walls.
Banal description will hardly kill a novel, but if they are sufficiently banal and frequent, why include them? Why describe places that are everyplace and weather that’s as bad as the weather anywhere? There is no reason, and part of the reason I called My Name is Asher Lev strange in the first paragraph is because these descriptive problems are not so enormous that they capsize the novel.
Alas, The Gift of Asher Lev is a disappointment compared to My Name is Asher Lev. One sees no growth, little reconciliation, and no useful understanding for the state of the first two in my list. The world is ambiguous, yes, and that’s pounded into our heads. Many great novels come to no conclusions but better illuminate the confusion of the life—such as Moby Dick—but The Gift of Asher Lev is not among them. Characters like Lev’s boorish, ignorant cousins are comic book foils that contrast with the Rebbe’s wisdom. Devorah has all the character of an empty housewife, despite the references to her existence
Moment of humor are a change, but they’re too few to be a signifiant one. Asher, growing tired of his community’s ceaseless suspicion of his life—it is hard to refer to being an artist as a mere “profession”—responds to one inconsiderate inquiry by saying “That’s why I became an artist. So I wouldn’t have to worry about what other people think. You hit the nail right on the head, Kroner.”
The classroom scene in Asher’s daughter’s Yeshiva is the book’s fulcrum and chief reason for interest, and it’s reminiscent of Barth’s metaphor of the soft-shell blue crab in The Friday Book, which all interested in the definition and meaning of art should read for that essay alone. In Potok’s rendition, Asher draws a ram in three ways: once poorly, like a child, again realistically, like a photograph, and again with portions exaggerated for effect, like an artist. He asks a class of children rhetorically, “Aren’t all three different ways of seeing the same object?” and as a defense of the subjectivity merging with the individual’s perception it’s wonderful. As a short story, it would be equally good. As a scene in a novel, it’s like an island rising above an otherwise cold sea.
We find too few of those islands, and transcendent pieces of writing are too rare and disconnected from the story. Using a different metaphor, one could say that too many white spaces lack connective tissue and simple are. One other good example of the good in this novel: Asher explains his gift by saying “I don’t hope to accomplish anything. I just do it,” which is as good an artist’s credo as any, albeit one that many, many artists have espoused in various forms at various times. Asher’s wife, Devorah, says at one point that “We hear a song or read a story, and the good feelings we get don’t remain inside us. We are either anticipating them, or we’ve had them and they’re gone. We never experience them as now.” Well, maybe, and she’s describing the specious present that William James wrote about. It’s not a bad thought, but it’s underdeveloped, like most of this novel. My Name is Asher Lev is stronger and less curmudgeonly. On page 104 of The Gift of Asher Lev, he thinks that “The ordinary was king. And the courtiers were popularization, shallowness, doubt, cynicism. The century was exhausted.” Five pages later, a friend says of the art world, “There is too much ersatz work being done now, calculated gestures everywhere, cultural entertainment.” Maybe there is: but so what? And even if the evils of cultural entertainment are upon us, one isn’t obliged to indulge them. How about less complaining and faux existentialism and more work?
You’ll find it, but in My Name is Asher Lev. I will end reiterating the point made in the first paragraph: pretend that My Name is Asher Lev has no sequel. You’ll like it better.
Read Chaim Potok’s strange yet compelling My Name Is Asher Lev and skip its deracinated sequel, The Gift of Asher Lev.
My Name is Asher Lev concerns a boy divided between the drive for art that possesses him and the Hasidic religion into which he is born, which is somewhat like the Jewish equivalent of fundamentalist Christians. Think of his sect like the Verbovers of Michael Chabon’s The Yiddish Policemen’s Union. The duality inherent in mixed loyalties is hardly a new topic; the most obvious example I know of is Herman Hesse’s Narcissus and Goldmund. But it’s done well here, and one feels Asher’s agony as he attempts to tread the artist’s path and the Hasidim’s. Inside, however, the artist predominates, and, as is typical in American fiction, self identity trumps group identity, as it should. Maybe Asher can’t help it. As a young man, he
began to realize that something was happening to my eyes. I looked at my father and saw lines and planes I had never seen before. I could feel with my eyes. […] I could feel texture and color.
The struggle to develop his eye and practice his visual art while remaining faithful to the extreme interpretations and teachings of religion fuels the novel’s conflict. Asher doesn’t give up, and if at times the pompousness of the art talk almost overwhelms, other moments of genuine emotion make up for near bombast. In some criticism of Asher’s art within the novel, one senses the same kind of criticism that might be used against Potok: sentimentality and a rejection of trends in art hobble him. Both novels act as defenses against that charge, and they are mostly successful. In growing up, Asher makes the difficult choices growing up entails. We think he makes the correct trade-offs, but in such a milieu, those trade-offs are grave indeed.
Parts of the novel fail, like a painting askew: a mythic ancestor arrives in Asher’s dreams for no particular point, and many descriptions are flat, especially given all the discussions of how an artist sees. Ones like this appear over and over:
I got off the train and climbed the stairs to the street. It was cold and wet and gray. A bitter wind blew against the tall buildings.
or
The beds were covered with spreads. The refrigerator hummed softly. The apartment was neat and clean and faintly resonant with its own silence.
or
It was a large waiting room with white walls, a single window in the wall to my right, and a heavy wooden door in the wall across from the window. There was a desk beneath the window and chairs along the walls.
Banal description will hardly kill a novel, but if they are sufficiently banal and frequent, why include them? Why describe places that are everyplace and weather that’s as bad as the weather anywhere? There is no reason, and part of the reason I called My Name is Asher Lev strange in the first paragraph is because these descriptive problems are not so enormous that they capsize the novel.
Alas, The Gift of Asher Lev is a disappointment compared to My Name is Asher Lev. One sees no growth, little reconciliation, and no useful understanding for the state of the first two in my list. The world is ambiguous, yes, and that’s pounded into our heads. Many great novels come to no conclusions but better illuminate the confusion of the life—such as Moby Dick—but The Gift of Asher Lev is not among them. Characters like Lev’s boorish, ignorant cousins are comic book foils that contrast with the Rebbe’s wisdom. Devorah has all the character of an empty housewife, despite the references to her existence
Moment of humor are a change, but they’re too few to be a signifiant one. Asher, growing tired of his community’s ceaseless suspicion of his life—it is hard to refer to being an artist as a mere “profession”—responds to one inconsiderate inquiry by saying “That’s why I became an artist. So I wouldn’t have to worry about what other people think. You hit the nail right on the head, Kroner.”
The classroom scene in Asher’s daughter’s Yeshiva is the book’s fulcrum and chief reason for interest, and it’s reminiscent of Barth’s metaphor of the soft-shell blue crab in The Friday Book, which all interested in the definition and meaning of art should read for that essay alone. In Potok’s rendition, Asher draws a ram in three ways: once poorly, like a child, again realistically, like a photograph, and again with portions exaggerated for effect, like an artist. He asks a class of children rhetorically, “Aren’t all three different ways of seeing the same object?” and as a defense of the subjectivity merging with the individual’s perception it’s wonderful. As a short story, it would be equally good. As a scene in a novel, it’s like an island rising above an otherwise cold sea.
We find too few of those islands, and transcendent pieces of writing are too rare and disconnected from the story. Using a different metaphor, one could say that too many white spaces lack connective tissue and simple are. One other good example of the good in this novel: Asher explains his gift by saying “I don’t hope to accomplish anything. I just do it,” which is as good an artist’s credo as any, albeit one that many, many artists have espoused in various forms at various times. Asher’s wife, Devorah, says at one point that “We hear a song or read a story, and the good feelings we get don’t remain inside us. We are either anticipating them, or we’ve had them and they’re gone. We never experience them as now.” Well, maybe, and she’s describing the specious present that William James wrote about. It’s not a bad thought, but it’s underdeveloped, like most of this novel. My Name is Asher Lev is stronger and less curmudgeonly. On page 104 of The Gift of Asher Lev, he thinks that “The ordinary was king. And the courtiers were popularization, shallowness, doubt, cynicism. The century was exhausted.” Five pages later, a friend says of the art world, “There is too much ersatz work being done now, calculated gestures everywhere, cultural entertainment.” Maybe there is: but so what? And even if the evils of cultural entertainment are upon us, one isn’t obliged to indulge them. How about less complaining and faux existentialism and more work?
You’ll find it, but in My Name is Asher Lev. I will end reiterating the point made in the first paragraph: pretend that My Name is Asher Lev has no sequel. You’ll like it better.
Bargain Hunting for Books, and Feeling Sheepish About It almost perfectly describes my book habits. The major difference is that I carefully examine the used and new prices; if they are sufficiently close, especially given shipping charges, I go new. But they often aren’t. Read the article and note this:
And what of the woman who sold me the [used] book [over the Internet]? She told me via e-mail that her real name was Heather Mash and that she worked as a domestic violence case manager in a women’s shelter not too far from Berkeley. She didn’t set out to subvert the publishing and bookselling world, she said. Like most of us who sell online, Ms. Mash began because she had too many books and wanted to raise money to buy more. “I would rather sell a book for a penny and let someone enjoy it than keep it collecting dust,” she said.
Many of the scholarly books I own concerning Melville or Tolkien would once have been unavailable or, if they were available, ludicrously expensive, and reading them probably would’ve required a good university library. Now I can buy them relatively cheaply; instead of $20 for Jane Chance’s The Mythology of Power, I got it for $4 or $5, counting shipping. Once, such books probably wouldn’t even have been available in paperback; the only option would’ve been hardbacks costing $45 – $100.
Although the New York Times article implies this hurts the publishing industry, I wonder if it really helps: a decreasing reliance on old books (or the “catalog”) means that publishers will be forced to pay more attention to new books if they are to make any money. At the same time, the real question is the extent to which used books are substitutes or complements for real books. With some works—like the classics cited in the article—the answer seems to be substitutes. With others, though, I suspect that readers are more likely to buy more books because they can better afford it.
The article implies that Amazon is partially a problem, but I would observe that people use Amazon because Amazon is incredibly, extraordinarily easy and cheap. It’s also simple to learn, as if easy and cheap weren’t enough. And the selection is good; for example, I recently mentioned Norman Rush’s extraordinary novel Mating in a post on The Mind-Body Problem. At this Amazon link, a dozen hardcover copies are available for “$0.01,” although this is deceptive because the $3.99 in shipping means that you’re actually paying $4. Still, that’s incredibly cheap; in a Seattle used bookstore not long ago, I saw a hardcover copy for $11. Furthermore, you can’t even buy new hardcover copies of Mating, and a used hardcover will probably last longer than a new paperback. Is it any surprise that I react to this situation with self-interest?
What can or should publishers do? I’m not entirely sure, but I suspect it means competing with their own catalog in terms of price. Or it might mean something else; I’m reminded of Ursula K. Le Guin’s excellent piece in Harper’s, Staying awake: Notes on the alleged decline of reading:
Books are social vectors, but publishers have been slow to see it. They barely even noticed book clubs until Oprah goosed them. But then the stupidity of the contemporary, corporation-owned publishing company is fathomless: they think they can sell books as commodities.
[…]
I keep hoping the corporations will wake up and realize that publishing is not, in fact, a normal business with a nice healthy relationship to capitalism. Elements of publishing are, or can be forced to be, successfully capitalistic: the textbook industry is all too clear a proof of that. How-to books and the like have some market predictability. But inevitably some of what publishers publish is, or is partly, literature—art. And the relationship of art to capitalism is, to put it mildly, vexed. It has not been a happy marriage. Amused contempt is about the pleasantest emotion either partner feels for the other. Their definitions of what profiteth a man are too different.
And one more point, this one from The Zen of Graphics Programming by way of a Slashdot comment:
Anecdote the third: A while back, I had the good fortune to have lunch down by Seattle’s waterfront with Neal Stephenson, the author of Snow Crash and The Diamond Age (one of the best SF books I’ve come across in a long time). As he talked about the nature of networked technology and what he hoped to see emerge, he mentioned that a couple of blocks down the street was the pawn shop where Jimi Hendrix bought his first guitar. His point was that if a cheap guitar hadn’t been available, Hendrix’s unique talent would never have emerged. Similarly, he views the networking of society as a way to get affordable creative tools to many people, so as much talent as possible can be unearthed and developed.
This semester, the University of Arizona bookstore charged around $400 for class books, or around $340 used. A combination of new and used books from Amazon ran to about $250. I’ll keep the $150, thanks. But I’ll probably end up spending the rest on other books.
Bargain Hunting for Books, and Feeling Sheepish About It almost perfectly describes my book habits. The major difference is that I carefully examine the used and new prices; if they are sufficiently close, especially given shipping charges, I go new. But they often aren’t. Read the article and note this:
And what of the woman who sold me the [used] book [over the Internet]? She told me via e-mail that her real name was Heather Mash and that she worked as a domestic violence case manager in a women’s shelter not too far from Berkeley. She didn’t set out to subvert the publishing and bookselling world, she said. Like most of us who sell online, Ms. Mash began because she had too many books and wanted to raise money to buy more. “I would rather sell a book for a penny and let someone enjoy it than keep it collecting dust,” she said.
Many of the scholarly books I own concerning Melville or Tolkien would once have been unavailable or, if they were available, ludicrously expensive, and reading them probably would’ve required a good university library. Now I can buy them relatively cheaply; instead of $20 for Jane Chance’s The Mythology of Power, I got it for $4 or $5, counting shipping. Once, such books probably wouldn’t even have been available in paperback; the only option would’ve been hardbacks costing $45 – $100.
Although the New York Times article implies this hurts the publishing industry, I wonder if it really helps: a decreasing reliance on old books (or the “catalog”) means that publishers will be forced to pay more attention to new books if they are to make any money. At the same time, the real question is the extent to which used books are substitutes or complements for real books. With some works—like the classics cited in the article—the answer seems to be substitutes. With others, though, I suspect that readers are more likely to buy more books because they can better afford it.
The article implies that Amazon is partially a problem, but I would observe that people use Amazon because Amazon is incredibly, extraordinarily easy and cheap. It’s also simple to learn, as if easy and cheap weren’t enough. And the selection is good; for example, I recently mentioned Norman Rush’s extraordinary novel Mating in a post on The Mind-Body Problem. At this Amazon link, a dozen hardcover copies are available for “$0.01,” although this is deceptive because the $3.99 in shipping means that you’re actually paying $4. Still, that’s incredibly cheap; in a Seattle used bookstore not long ago, I saw a hardcover copy for $11. Furthermore, you can’t even buy new hardcover copies of Mating, and a used hardcover will probably last longer than a new paperback. Is it any surprise that I react to this situation with self-interest?
What can or should publishers do? I’m not entirely sure, but I suspect it means competing with their own catalog in terms of price. Or it might mean something else; I’m reminded of Ursula K. Le Guin’s excellent piece in Harper’s, Staying awake: Notes on the alleged decline of reading:
Books are social vectors, but publishers have been slow to see it. They barely even noticed book clubs until Oprah goosed them. But then the stupidity of the contemporary, corporation-owned publishing company is fathomless: they think they can sell books as commodities.
[…]
I keep hoping the corporations will wake up and realize that publishing is not, in fact, a normal business with a nice healthy relationship to capitalism. Elements of publishing are, or can be forced to be, successfully capitalistic: the textbook industry is all too clear a proof of that. How-to books and the like have some market predictability. But inevitably some of what publishers publish is, or is partly, literature—art. And the relationship of art to capitalism is, to put it mildly, vexed. It has not been a happy marriage. Amused contempt is about the pleasantest emotion either partner feels for the other. Their definitions of what profiteth a man are too different.
And one more point, this one from The Zen of Graphics Programming by way of a Slashdot comment:
Anecdote the third: A while back, I had the good fortune to have lunch down by Seattle’s waterfront with Neal Stephenson, the author of Snow Crash and The Diamond Age (one of the best SF books I’ve come across in a long time). As he talked about the nature of networked technology and what he hoped to see emerge, he mentioned that a couple of blocks down the street was the pawn shop where Jimi Hendrix bought his first guitar. His point was that if a cheap guitar hadn’t been available, Hendrix’s unique talent would never have emerged. Similarly, he views the networking of society as a way to get affordable creative tools to many people, so as much talent as possible can be unearthed and developed.
This semester, the University of Arizona bookstore charged around $400 for class books, or around $340 used. A combination of new and used books from Amazon ran to about $250. I’ll keep the $150, thanks. But I’ll probably end up spending the rest on other books.
Some novels grow in rereading while others shrink,* and Rebecca Goldstein’s The Mind-Body Problem, first discussed here, is among the former.** It’s wry and self-aware; after modestly painful cultural experiences at elite universities that perhaps consider themselves more elite than they actually are, Renee feels mentally inferior to peers and professors and responds with the body while still contemplating why, as a creature of thought, she is also so firmly a creature. This might sound as boring as the too-extensive academic philosophy papers on the subject. But instead of futile attempts at resolution, The Mind-Body Problem explores its general ridiculousness, both for the consciousness and the social structures in which the consciousness resides:
I had gotten used to thinking of myself as an intellectual. I had assumed that certain properties of mind and body were entailed by this description and had designed myself accordingly. It’s hard to discover you’ve constructed yourself on false premises.
She hasn’t, of course, and bad feedback from her environment (both scholastic and familial) combined with her own, Woody Allen-esque neuroticism that leads her to this conclusion. Besides, we know or would like to think we know that her conclusion is false because we are, after all, reading about her, and a smarter person is usually though not always more interesting to read about. That brings up the question of intellectuals and intelligence, which might not be fully overlapping categories.
One subtler observation: what distinguishes intellectuals from most people isn’t the size of their pomposity, but their ability to question assumptions (including their own) and perceive the world from different perspectives, while most people seem are stuck—frozen, really—in their own, unable to make impressive cognitive leaps into another’s imagination. They haven’t thawed sufficiently to mentally leap from person to person; this, I would argue, is the great cognitive change in Noam at the end of the novel, when he can or will no longer see the world from the perspective of math and instead tries to see it from the perspective of people. Renee, meanwhile, does so almost instinctively, and her assessments of herself and others are some of The Mind-Body Problem‘s funniest moments.
The Mind-Body Problem is like—or maybe just is—philosophy done really, really well in the sense that it can see the larger, abstract picture based on specific events and vice-versa, and it’s intelligible in seeing those events. Few novels or philosophy tracts have both sides, and most of those philosophy tracts have forgotten how to express themselves comprehensibly. (Quick Studies: The Best of Lingua Franca has an excellent piece on this subject, which compares Orwell and Theodore Adorno.) The narrator’s skill is part of this effect, since Renee is aware of herself and aware of how ridiculous she is, much like the unnamed protagonist in Norman Rush’s Mating. Recursive self-awareness begets cerebral humor, especially dirty cerebral humor. What’s not to like? Renee is muddling through choices that aren’t appealing, and her compromises look less like betrayals of fundamental beliefs and more like adult compromises the closer she gets to them:
My first year [at the Princeton Philosophy department] had been disastrous, and my second, just beginning, gave every indication of being worse. In short, I was floundering, and thus quite prepared to follow the venerably old feminine tradition of being saved by marriage.
But she can still laugh about it. When Noam arrives at his epiphanies—though they feel contrived—we’re relieved, and he, like Renee, grows along with the novel. I could ask for little more.
* Robert Heinlein, I’m looking at you, and in particular Stranger in a Strange Land, a novel that, while still not bad, is too philosophically simplistic and, by the end, silly. Every person in the novel but Mike is completely flat, and Mike only avoids that fate by being a symbolic repository for the feelings of all the flat characters. Even then, he’s not fully developed. It is possible to a symbolic repository and developed—think of Ahab in Moby Dick—but Mike isn’t even close. Nonetheless, I still retain a great deal of fondness for Stranger in a Strange Land, and it’s still enormously fun even when you’re rolling your eyes.
** Much like Michael Chabon’s Wonder Boys.
Some novels grow in rereading while others shrink,* and Rebecca Goldstein’s The Mind-Body Problem, first discussed here, is among the former.** It’s wry and self-aware; after modestly painful cultural experiences at elite universities that perhaps consider themselves more elite than they actually are, Renee feels mentally inferior to peers and professors and responds with the body while still contemplating why, as a creature of thought, she is also so firmly a creature. This might sound as boring as the too-extensive academic philosophy papers on the subject. But instead of futile attempts at resolution, The Mind-Body Problem explores its general ridiculousness, both for the consciousness and the social structures in which the consciousness resides:
I had gotten used to thinking of myself as an intellectual. I had assumed that certain properties of mind and body were entailed by this description and had designed myself accordingly. It’s hard to discover you’ve constructed yourself on false premises.
She hasn’t, of course, and bad feedback from her environment (both scholastic and familial) combined with her own, Woody Allen-esque neuroticism that leads her to this conclusion. Besides, we know or would like to think we know that her conclusion is false because we are, after all, reading about her, and a smarter person is usually though not always more interesting to read about. That brings up the question of intellectuals and intelligence, which might not be fully overlapping categories.
One subtler observation: what distinguishes intellectuals from most people isn’t the size of their pomposity, but their ability to question assumptions (including their own) and perceive the world from different perspectives, while most people seem are stuck—frozen, really—in their own, unable to make impressive cognitive leaps into another’s imagination. They haven’t thawed sufficiently to mentally leap from person to person; this, I would argue, is the great cognitive change in Noam at the end of the novel, when he can or will no longer see the world from the perspective of math and instead tries to see it from the perspective of people. Renee, meanwhile, does so almost instinctively, and her assessments of herself and others are some of The Mind-Body Problem‘s funniest moments.
The Mind-Body Problem is like—or maybe just is—philosophy done really, really well in the sense that it can see the larger, abstract picture based on specific events and vice-versa, and it’s intelligible in seeing those events. Few novels or philosophy tracts have both sides, and most of those philosophy tracts have forgotten how to express themselves comprehensibly. (Quick Studies: The Best of Lingua Franca has an excellent piece on this subject, which compares Orwell and Theodore Adorno.) The narrator’s skill is part of this effect, since Renee is aware of herself and aware of how ridiculous she is, much like the unnamed protagonist in Norman Rush’s Mating. Recursive self-awareness begets cerebral humor, especially dirty cerebral humor. What’s not to like? Renee is muddling through choices that aren’t appealing, and her compromises look less like betrayals of fundamental beliefs and more like adult compromises the closer she gets to them:
My first year [at the Princeton Philosophy department] had been disastrous, and my second, just beginning, gave every indication of being worse. In short, I was floundering, and thus quite prepared to follow the venerably old feminine tradition of being saved by marriage.
But she can still laugh about it. When Noam arrives at his epiphanies—though they feel contrived—we’re relieved, and he, like Renee, grows along with the novel. I could ask for little more.
* Robert Heinlein, I’m looking at you, and in particular Stranger in a Strange Land, a novel that, while still not bad, is too philosophically simplistic and, by the end, silly. Every person in the novel but Mike is completely flat, and Mike only avoids that fate by being a symbolic repository for the feelings of all the flat characters. Even then, he’s not fully developed. It is possible to a symbolic repository and developed—think of Ahab in Moby Dick—but Mike isn’t even close. Nonetheless, I still retain a great deal of fondness for Stranger in a Strange Land, and it’s still enormously fun even when you’re rolling your eyes.
** Much like Michael Chabon’s Wonder Boys.
“Only one who has mastered a tradition has a right to attempt to add to it or rebel against it.”
—Chaim Potok, My Name Is Asher Lev
Bernhard Schlink’s The Reader is sensual and philosophical, moving from the former, which predominates in the beginning, toward the latter in a manner “both purposeful and purposeless, successful and futile,” as Michael describes the journeys in the Odyssey. “What is else is the history of the law?” he asks, and one might ask the same of history, full stop, or of love; The Reader implies that there is no answer save that the law, history, or love have whatever purpose we graft onto it, just as one could argue for a sensual reading of the novel, especially in the first part, or a philosophic, especially as Michael grows older. A young man with an older woman named Hanna feels the sensual as well as their, and its, doom, while the second, comes from an older lawyer who finds that his first love, if one can call it that, is being tried for crimes that would seem astonishing if not for the time period and location. There is a third part I will demure from speaking much of; to do so would give too much away in a novel that often feels like it gives too little away, especially of its feelings. Chapters end with no sense of ending beyond the beginning of the next chapter. Chapters of Michael’s life end with a similar lack of fanfare, and The Reader is, at its base, a novel that almost demands readings as analytic as its protagonist is inclined to give.
Some descriptions in The Reader are simple and true enough not to need elaboration, and those who have undergone extensive trials will recognize what happens when Michael’s bout with hepatitis renders him hospitalized for months: “although friends still came to see me, I had been sick for so long that their visits could no longer bridge the gap between their daily lives and mine, and became shorter and shorter.” Then again, Michael does not make friends easily, and his eventual wife is a ghostly presence who seems to affect him less than the hepatitis, or, for that matter, the weather. Perhaps this event combined with natural temperament and his liaisons with Hanna make Michael himself. Or maybe he was always this way, and that’s what brought him to Hanna and her secrets. Alas: those apt sentences like the one describing Michael’s illness tantalize us for more, and yet they are not forthcoming.
This novel is hardly alone in its remote, abstract mode. What is it about these Europeans—Schlink, Milan Kundera, and Mario Vargas Llosa*—who write short, sheer novels in which scenes are described and then left, like shards of a pot or torn pages from a book, for us to construct, or reconstruct? The length of the mostly rhetorical question probably indicates how little of an answer I can give. It’s almost as if the denial of a character’s interpretation, or the uncertain certainty they display when they do give interpretations, are or should be a statement of what we won’t know. Although this is overly abstract, perhaps I’m given to say it by having just finished The Reader, which challenges us to read the unreadable, and my chief response to it has to be a level above the action itself. The book just ends with a statement so devoid of interpretation that the feeling it must submerge becomes enhanced all the more because of its hiddenness. Like a great novel, we are left to wonder.
But I purposefully say “like a great novel,” rather than calling the novel itself great.
* I know: Llosa was born in Peru. But he feels European and lives part-time in European countries, so I count him as one here.
(See my initial laudatory post here.)
John Barth’s Further Fridays continued to delight till the end, and it hovers ceaselessly around literary questions about form, character, ways of telling, and meaning. Do those sound boring? Maybe when I list them, but when they become part of Barth’s stories—and the Further Friday pieces feel more like stories than essays—they come alive like a Maryland Blue Crab. Consider this great big chunk of quote—appropriate, maybe, for someone who often delivers great big chunks of novel—but it also shows some of Barth’s gift at the level of sentence and idea:
I confess to having gotten increasingly this way [as in, insisting for just facts, whatever those are] myself over the years—an occupational side effect, I believe, in the case of those of us for whom the experience of fiction can never be innocent entertainment. We’re forever sizing it up, measuring ourselves against its author, watching to see how the effects are managed and whether all the dramaturgical pistols that were hung on the wall in act one get duly fired in act three. We’re like those musicians who can’t abide background music: They can’t listen except professionally, and if they’re not in the mood to do that, they prefer conversation, street noise, silence—anything but music.
Right: notice the quick metaphor of the dramaturgical pistols—alluding to the idea that a gun seen in an early chapter should be fired in a later one—and the slightly more developed metaphor of the musician. The musician idea is particularly relevant to Barth, who played as a young man—more on that later—but it also expresses one of the central themes in his work: that innocence prolonged is detrimental to the person holding it and that naive readings eventually give way to sophisticated and experienced readings. They show the growth of not just the critic, writer, or reader, but also of the individual, whose early actions and impressions should be tempered by experience. But some attempt to prolong naiveté foolishly, while others forget to try and see the perspective of the innocent or the childlike joy that can lead to great art. So what is one to do? Muddle along as best one can, Barth seems to argue, and learn as much as you can about that imperfect state we call life and the reactions of other smart or wise people to it.
I realize that the above paragraph sounds almost like self-help lite, but it would be a mistake to see Barth that way, and he discusses far more than just the nature of a particular story. Elsewhere, he deals with literary categorization, which has never been among my favorite subjects because it often seems to generate vastly more noise than music, and its combatants often mistaken that cacophony for a symphony. Barth does a reasonably good job—which is to say, as good a job as one can, given the subject matter and persnickety pedants likely to be interested—of not being caught in its brambles. Adding sufficient qualification makes for fewer explosions but greater harmony; as Barth says of Roland Barthes’ Writing Degree Zero
“the whole of literature,” [as Barth quotes Barthes] “from Flaubert to the present day, becomes the problematics of language.” If only he had been content to say that “the problematics of language”—indeed, the problematics of every aspect of the medium of literature, not language alone—becomes one of several prominent field-identification marks of our literature after “Flaubert.” But that kind of reasonable modification, I suppose, de-zings such zingers.
Given the choice of being mostly right and demure or mostly wrong and provocative, Barth takes the mostly right path. Still, he’s not “demure” as in boring, and his essays are filled with unusual zest. Sometimes the footnotes are the best parts; the blockquote above is one, and he sneaks another comment into a footnote, though it’s reiterated elsewhere in the body text: “As for twentieth-century literary Postmodernism, I date it from when many of us stopped worrying about the death of the novel (a Modernist worry) and began worrying about the death of the reader—and of the planet—instead.” The sentiment has its tongue-in-cheek enough not to be taken completely seriously, and yet it’s accurate enough to consider further consideration. Maybe in jokes we tell the greatest truths that could never slide by as bald assertions.
The piece the modernist definition comes from was published in the 1980s, although it reprises arguments from 1968 and 1979, about which one can read more in The Friday Book. But its concerns are still germane: global climate change fears fuel cataclysmic scenarios that aren’t implausible, as do those involving the death of reading. Reading’s demise seems to be greatly exaggerated—what do most of us do online and via e-mail if not read, as Steven Berlin Johnson argues in Dawn of the Digital Natives—but the quality of reading seems to diminish apace online. Still, websites with global reach and many visitors seem fairly literate, and the only well-known, sub-literate blog I can think of is Mark Cuban’s, which I won’t dignify with a link. Then again, Cuban is also sitting on such a giant pile of cash that I doubt he cares about literacy, or Postmodernism.
Like Barth, I seem to have wandered a bit, and also like him, I’d like to circle back round to the main point of this post, which is to emphasize how good Further Fridays is. Sections repeat and reiterate earlier ideas, but I think of the repetitions more as variations in different keys than as irritants, and I think Barth would like that metaphor: he played jazz as a teenager and writes of going to Julliard to discover he had no or too little talent for music (my own musical talent, if I had any to begin with, has probably become undetectable thanks to lack of exercise). Milan Kundera also took up writing after music, and I wonder if other good example of musicians-turned-writers exist aside from Alex Ross, who turned from music to write about music. Barth is as self-referentially modest about his musical abilities as his other points, almost cloaking himself in faux humility when he writes, for instance: “My modest point is that the story of your life might be told as a series of career moves, or love affairs, or intellectual friendships, or houses lived in, or ideologies subscribed to (even magazines subscribed to), or physical afflictions suffered, or what have you, and that every one of those series might be recounted from very different perspectives, to very different effect.” Indeed: and we appreciate that, and the way it implicitly makes the case for reading. He preaches like the native to a religion he nonetheless realizes fewer practice:
If you happen to be a refugee from the Dorchester County tide marshes… as I was and remain, and particularly if you aspire to keep one foot at least ankle deep in your native bog while the other foot traipses through the wider world, it is well to have such an off-the-cart smorgasbord [of reading] under your belt, for ballast.
Incidentally, I’m fascinated with the catastrophic view of reading and its discontents: consider Jonathan Franzen’s introduction to How to Be Alone:
I used to consider it apocalyptically [there’s that end-times terminology again] worrisome that Americans watch a lot of TV and don’t read much Henry James. I used to be the kind of religious nut who convinces himself that, because the world doesn’t share his faith (for me, a faith in literature), we must be living in End Times.
I wonder too, as this blog probably demonstrates. Still, I’d argue that you can’t avoid keeping one foot in your native bog, regardless of whether that metaphorical bog is the boring suburbs of Bellevue, Washington, as it was for me, or the foothills of the Himalayas, or New York City, so you might as well do so in a way that makes you part of the wider rather than narrower world, so you can reconcile the two as best you can. The most efficient way to do so, it seems to me, is the way Barth recommends: promiscuous and wild reading, and ideally of books as interesting as Further Fridays.
The Story's Story 